Schlarb, Damien

This graduate seminar
explores digital games (“video games” or “computer games”) as a characteristic
form of 21^st-century American digital media and technology cultures.
The course doubles as a survey of major topics in technology culture and as an
introduction to the field of Digital Game Studies. Video games present a major
culture industry, one whose revenue and profits starkly outrank other
industries like film, literature, and music (approx. 280-347 billion $ revenue
worldwide in 2022). Given this economic footprint, we may ask whether and how
games matter culturally. Are games a characteristic form for our cultural
moment? Do they produce culture? That is, do they allow us to engage with our
own attitudes, thinking, and histories? Do they enable us to confront our
actual (vs. our stated) values? And if so, how do they generate meanings? The
class tries to answer these questions within the methodological framework of
American Studies. We proceed in three steps: (1) We begin by exploring
the categories relevant for formally analyzing video games, for example
algorithmically enforced rules, embodiment in virtual worlds, designed
agencies, and procedurality. Video games differ from other texts (literature,
film, TV) in that they embody us in simulations of reality and make us act in
specific ways within their virtual worlds. Hence, we must critically analyze
the designs of these agencies and worlds to determine what they mean. (2) We
then create a contextual frame of reference for our interpretations by surveying
the political and technical underpinnings of contemporary American technology
culture, for instance the logics of algorithms, software formalism,
solutionism, neoliberal surveillance and platform capitalism. This survey
allows us to think critically about the contexts video games exist in and to
parse out how (by what formal means) they make us co-generate meanings and
participate in ideologies. We will read texts from diverse academic disciplines
and fields, such as Game Studies, Media Studies, Philosophy, Computer Science,
and Sociology. (3) We will discuss select games and craft our own sample
interpretations. Note: you do not have to be an avid “gamer” or
especially technology savvy to participate.

Methodology
/ Final Papers: We will employ a critical-analytical and historicist
methodology. We will treat games as a kind of text that exists in specific
contexts. The goal of our work (class discussion and final papers) will be to
establish critical readings that make a case for what games mean and how we
should think about them. Meanings are not obvious or self-explanatory, we must
argue for them by presenting evidence, conducting analysis and research, and,
finally, by offering an interpretation. Our discussions and your final papers
will draw on both the methods and theories we cover in class and on the
approaches and critical theories you already know from other classes.
Considerations like the materiality of games, the production processes behind
them, and the (online) communities and affects that form around them may inform
those interpretations, but ultimately, your readings must take a stand on a
complex problem (e.g., the colonial politics of Civilization, the gender
performances in Horizon Zero Dawn, the rendering of immigration and
totalitarianism in Papers, Please) and present compelling evidence for your
position.

This lecture course
introduces students to the interdisciplinary field of American Studies and
provides an overview of its methods, theories, materials, resources, and areas
of study. Individual sessions will give introductory accounts of North American
geography, demographic developments and U.S. immigration history, major issues
and coordinates of North American and U.S. history, the political system of the
U.S., American ideologies and identity constructions, the religious landscape
of the U.S., multilingualism and language politics in North America.

Course Reading Material:

Udo Hebel's Einführung in die Amerikanistik/American Studies (Metzler, 2008) will be our course reader. Getting the book is mandatory. You may either use the e-book version (free for UR students via the online Library Catalog at www.regensburger-katalog.de) or purchase a hard copy.

Simon J. Bronner's Encyclopedia of American Studies (Johns Hopkins UP, 2014) will be our companion reference handbook. It offers quick-reference, supplementary definitions of key terms we cover each session. It is available for free online via eas-ref.press.jhu.edu.

This course
consists of two sections: a lecture and a seminar. Regular attendance in both is strongly
recommended. While the lecture introduces critical theories and approaches, the
seminars offer practical guidance for implementing these theories and enable students
to create their own critical analyses and literary interpretations. Together,
the two courses impart the fundamental knowledge and the practical skills
necessary for the study of English and American literature and help you bridge
the divide between abstract comprehension and practical implementation: The
lecture introduces students to foundational disciplinary concepts, such as
‘literature,’ ‘culture,’ and ‘text.’ We retrace and discuss pertinent major
literary forms and genres, survey theoretical approaches and, and cover the emergence
of literary history, canonization, and periodization. The seminars will help
you develop the skills you need to succeed in both British and American Literary
and Cultural Studies seminars, as well as for your final projects and exams (final papers, BA/MA
theses, Staatsexamen). Seminars provide you with focused practice assignments
and in-person guidance on how to translate the topics covered in the lecture
into productive academic habits. Specifically, you will work on how to cite
evidence, perform formal analysis, develop research questions based on literary
theory, and propose interpretations. Note: seminar instructors will not repeat the contents
of the lecture. Their task lies exclusively in aiding you in honing your
analytical and interpretive skills. The lecture will also further this goal
more directly by addressing practical strategies of research and writing towards
the end of the semester.

This proseminar surveys major American literary periods,
genres, artistic movements, and authors from the twentieth to the twenty-first
century. We will discuss author biographies and historical contexts, as well as
representative texts and formal markers for each period. Building on these
foundational discussions, we will develop our own critical readings and
interpretations, bringing to bear both classical and recent critical theories. Our
goals will be to develop a holistic sense of the evolving American literary
canon and to hone our critical-analytical and argumentative skills. Modernism(s)
nominally present the dominant (and arguably ongoing) strain in American
literary production for much of the last century. Americans at home and abroad
dealt with experiences of expansion, technological advancement, mushrooming
wealth, war, social and racial strife, and existential loss. Authors like F.
Scott Fitzgerald and Langston Hughes explored the possibility of making society
and culture “new,” while W.E.B. DuBois produces the first systematic theory of
the African American experience. Gertrude Stein and T.S. Eliot experimented
with topics and form to sound the pliability of identity. However, literary
periods are not cut and dry, and the transitions from one aesthetic current to
the next are blurry and ambivalent. We begin our survey with Realism,
Modernism’s predecessor and the major movement of the nineteenth century, which
emerged from a newly minted, burgeoning middle class. Authors like Henry James
and William Dean Howells sought to cast writing as a form of scientific inquiry
and explored through literature the mechanics of social stratification. Naturalism
emerges from the in-between spaces of Realism, with authors beginning to
displace humans from the center of their thinking. Stephen Crane and Frank
Norris, for instance, saw humans in the clutches of overwhelming, faceless
forces, both natural and economic. At the dusk of Modernism, late- or
postmodernist writers explore the textual nature of reality. Sandra Cisneros
depicts immigrant and broader existences, George Saunders sounds existential
themes under modern capitalism, and N.K. Jemisin examines the impact of
technology and a revitalized interest in collective political action.